


Kintsugi Threads

by CrumblingAsh



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Afghanistan, Bruce's Sad Backstory, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, JARVIS - Freeform, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Poor Bruce, Poor Tony, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War, Pre-Relationship, Protective Bruce, Protective Tony, Self-Hatred, Slow Build, Tony has PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-26 15:11:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3855229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrumblingAsh/pseuds/CrumblingAsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been months since Ultron (or weeks, or days - time's stopped being a point of matter for Tony, anymore) when a rescue beacon from one of the parachutes from the jet Bruce had taken lights up the screen in the workshop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChibiYoda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiYoda/gifts), [Trammel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trammel/gifts), [The_Lady_smaell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lady_smaell/gifts).



* * *

 

 

For the first time since Afghanistan and its damp, ragged cave, the walls that surround Tony are completely silent.

 

Outside of the suit, his alternate AI is limited to beeps and alerts with a few strokes of his fingers, a pitch or two too-high to distinguish her from the chatter of the bots moving almost listlessly around the floor. He’s not eaten for two days, and by his command she can’t scold him – without connections, she can’t direct the bots to feed him. By nothing more than his want, all she is a glorified computing system, nothing that Apple or Microsoft or _Hammer_ can’t achieve in a matter of months, with just the idea.

 

He’s a god to them and pathetic for it. Worse, he doesn’t care.

 

The display screen beside him, feet away, blinks furiously with missed call notifications – sometimes when he glances over, the most recent is from Steve; other times, it’s one from Rhodey. Every now and then, Pepper’s name appears like a blip, an accident, and if he blinks it’s topped by someone else (how the hell does Barton even have _signal_ in his little bumfuck house, let alone this number?).

 

He’s keeping an eye on the news – there’s no emergency. They’re fine.

 

Straddling an unstable stool, he’s exhausted, and yet his eyes won’t close – not that he wants them to. Doesn’t want to sleep, not really, because what good does that do? What good does not sleeping do, then? The same as a fake smile, a joke thrown away, a grand performance to an empty room, alone on a stage.

 

_**Empty.**_ Huh.

 

That’s a good word.

 

His fingers trip at the thought and for the three-hundred-and-fifty-seven-thousandth time, he looks at them, or rather, looks at the slim, tiny, gleaming golden disk flipping almost carelessly through them. A catch of sunlight, a ray filtered through the window – something he can’t quite grab, can’t hold, loses if he moves away. It’s almost insignificant, for as much as it’s very, _very not._ He flips it across his fingers again, feels an intake of soft greed that coats him like oil, and relishes in the numbing feeling.

 

(Right now, in another universe somewhere, JARVIS is sassing at him, mocking his thoughts and running his programs (his house, his _life_ ). Maybe, in that same universe, Tony’s different – maybe Afghanistan had never happened. Maybe, in that universe, Stark Industries had never developed weapons, has never existed at all. Maybe, in that universe, Tony’s hands always make good things, always work in sync with his mind and not as an obedient afterthought. Maybe, in that universe, _he doesn’t ruin everything he touches –)_

He twirls the disk around his fingers again. Soft movements.

 

_Over, under, over, under, over, under._

It’s so quiet. There’s not even another body around, to tease his ears with the sounds of breathing, as Yinsen had done years ago. Because he’s muted those, too. People. Muted them and shoved them away, thrown them to their own tasks and left them alone.

 

A flicker on the screen catches his attention – Steve’s calling, again.

 

It’s only been three weeks. Why are they calling after only three weeks?

 

What’s three weeks to three months?

 

_Mute,_ his thoughts hiss savagely. _Mute, mute, **mute.**_

A gentle nudge against his back draws mind away from the screen, away from his thoughts – DUM-E whirrs quietly when Tony turns to look at him, claw bowed in classic puppy-dog manner, and the whole sight makes him flinch. There’s still chips in the bot’s paint, dents in the frame that he hasn’t fixed, needs he had pushed aside time and again for other, _more important_ things. DUM-E doesn’t know enough to be bitter for it. Angry.

 

“What’s up, kiddo?” His voice is as dry as he throat and he ignores and soaks in it – his free hand reaches out to pat the top of the bot’s head before he freezes. No, **_no._** He withdraws it quickly. “What?” He tries again. “Need to charge? Want oiled? Brothers picking on you? We’re short a translator, kid, so you need to help me out a little.” His throat is burning, he swallows, and DUM-E whines softly, rotating his claw with a series of clicks Tony had understood once and doesn’t now, backs away before things can get complicated.

 

His bent up frame out of the way leaves the other display screen in view of Tony’s instinctive gaze. The map of blue lines and darkened space still perfect place, as they have been for the three weeks that he’s had the display running, blank and just as silent as the walls, waiting-

 

For the soundless, pulsating red light currently blinking in the center of it.

 

“… _shit_ ,” slips from his mouth in surprise.

 

The quinjet Bruce (or the Hulk, whichever) had taken off with had been in stealth mode, which Tony hadn’t switched back on even after Natasha herself had informed him of the situation. Theoretically, outside of his own systems, it had been rendered unable to be tracked, and even its apparent crash site in the middle of the ocean was a guess of authenticity. But the quinjet had also been equipped with a series of parachutes, each bearing their own, immeasurably small tracking device, which Bruce himself had badgered Tony into adding to the inventory.

 

And now the activation of one flashes red and patient on the screen in front of him, and Tony stares.

 

Bruce had run … there are no news reports that will tell him about anything to do with a lost, American human man, when there are so many that fit that exact description. A giant green rage monster will draw international attention, but an exhausted, middle-aged scientist … the news will tell him if there’s an Avenger-level emergency big enough to answer a call. There are numerous shadow agencies who would jump at the opportunity to capture and arrest an unprotected Bruce Banner. The transmitter is the only way he has of asking for help – it could be an emergency.

Again, he looks down at the little yellow disk, now unmoving in the palm of his hand, as if still of its own accord. He doesn’t remember stopping the twirl of it. He doesn’t particularly want to leave.

 

DUM-E whines again, low and wounded-sounding, and again, Tony flinches in the crack it makes through the silence.

 

Because it is – the sort of quiet that precedes the arrival of the fall of judgment, the bullet of a terrorist or the emptiness of lifeless, murdered eyes.

 

_It could be an emergency._

“Damn it, Banner.” The words choke out against the desert of his throat, like he’s swallowed sand, and carefully, he pockets the disk.

 

His legs wobble uncertainly as he stands, and when he cautiously reaches out for the armor his head swims at the sudden rush of sound. Jumps at the connection of something _touching him_ , wrapping around him, encasing and bracing him to remain upright.

 

“Sir?” A completely wrong voice queries. Glorified computer. Nothing more.

 

_Damn it,_ he thinks again.

 

“Grab the map coordinates,” he commands with more strength than he has. “I think I have a date.”

 

Bruce’s location lights up in a transparent diagram in front of him. The red dot still vibrant and flashing, waiting.

 

“Arrival time is estimated at-.”

 

“Mute.” Because he doesn’t care. Isn’t that how it is? “Just get me there.”

 

There’s so much noise as the suit begins to fire up, familiar vibrations surrounding his body, and yet it’s as if he’s hearing nothing at all.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

 

 

Sleeping is difficult when you can’t turn down the noise of the outside world. It’s worse when the noise inside of your head is even louder, leaving the rhythm of the Earth’s sound to play background to the thoughts racing through your mind that you can never get to shut up. It’s deafening, irritating – maddening, when you eventually realize that it’s actually not that loud outside at all. The rest of the world is peacefully quiet. All the noise is coming from _you_.

 

On his bed of clothes and sand, Bruce tries valiantly to keep his eyes closed.

 

There has always been a fissure in his mind, swollen from infection and sore from constant touch, never fully closed over by more than the gooey yellow scab of reforming tissue, often hemorrhaging in a sourceless swirl of rage and agony that never fails to make him sick. He’d been born with it, maybe. Or perhaps he’d done it to himself, during one of those early nights when his younger self had cowered in small, shadowed crevices at the first sign of anger; had bitten his tongue at the sight of bruises on his mother’s fair, fragile skin-

 

“No,” he growls firmly at the stirring of heaviness inside of his head. It stretches down to press against his chest tentatively from the inside anyway – not curious, not angry, not sad. Heavy. That’s all the Hulk is anymore, these days. So fucking heavy. _“No.”_

Despite his intentions (or in spite of himself), Bruce’s eyes crack open.

 

Feet away from his shelter of leaves that block the last reaches of the sun’s setting light across the sky, he can see the faintest glimmer of the tiny circle that still blinks blue in some sort of proud, echoing taunt – it makes his lungs seize in the same oxygen-deprived suffocation as his anger. He hadn’t intended to activate it. It had been stupid to keep it around at all, the unused parachute with its damnable tracking device (Steve’s parachute, his mind supplies quietly. Blue light means that it’s Steve’s parachute that had been snatched up from the rapidly sinking quinjet).

 

He’d been sleeping, or trying to – it’s easier to sleep when the sun’s up than when the darkness takes everything away. He’d been wrapped around the fabric of the parachute and, by default, the device, and when the dream had come – one of the awful ones that don’t require you to be truly asleep to start playing their fragmented little pictures, his hands had reacted before he had been able to think.

 

Time spent in New York has tricked him into believing that being in trouble means calling Tony – an illusion that had made his terror-drugged finger press the button.

 

Bile bites at his throat in the knowledge that Tony has probably dropped everything ( _important_ things), has jumped into one of his paranoia-made armors, just to be able to get to him as quickly as possible.

 

_‘Sorry to have bothered you,’_ he imagines himself saying. _‘I had a nightmare and got a little scared. No big deal. Anyway, I know you just flew halfway across the world, but I don’t suppose you could just go back home now and pretend that this never happened?’_

Bruce doesn’t _want_ Tony here. He doesn’t want to be found by anyone at all.

 

_(“Don’t you hide from me!” The voice roared, low with promised violence. “You think I won’t find you?”)_

“Stop!”

 

Sand flies as Bruce finds himself scrambling to get upright, to stand, _movegetawayhe’scomingnostopit’sadreamyou’refine **hide**_

****

The Hulk thumps against his chest in a hard suddenness that knocks him back against the ground, an edge of emotion inside of his intention that hasn’t been there in weeks _getup-_

**“Stop!”** Bruce shouts it to the ocean that calmly laps against the shoreline and to the monster inside of his body and to the damn memory-dream that won’t stop chasing him; desperate. He wants to grab his chest and just rip himself apart to make it- **“Stop, stop, stop!”**

_His_ hands pound against the sand, _his_ fingers claw into it in a vain attempt to latch onto something. _His_ spine arches out as his forehead presses against the rapidly cooling ground – _his_ voice is the one that keens, high and pitiful and angry.

 

_‘You should teach me your breathing exercises sometime.’_ Natasha’s voice slips quietly into his head, light and kind as his memory serves. _‘Maybe in exchange, I can give you some tips on handling SHIELD agents.’_

 

The image of her deadly eyes makes his hands tingle, no comfort in them to give. Instead, tucked against the ground, he inhales breath after breath of hot air and salt-tainted sand, exhales in violent puffs that send dust up against his closed eyes. He’s angry in the way that isn’t rage, in the way that’s old and familiar and hasn’t disappeared since (no), but it won’t get him anywhere; it never does; where can it, here? There’s no bomb to build, no buildings to smash, no innocent people to kill because he can’t handle himself, _fuck, Banner, there really isn’t anything redeeming about you at all, is there?_

He’s either laughing or crying by this point, fingers tangling in his hair. The whine of repulsors against the walls of noise in his ears only makes him do whichever it is harder.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony expects guns. He expects tanks. He expects helicopters and jets and maybe an old-fashioned bomber plane, because that’s how far his mind is digging into scenarios that would make the elusive physicist announce his zealously guarded secret location.

 

He expects a graveyard of destruction that scatters across both sea and land; headstones of twisted, burning metal to mark the drowned or ruined bodies of men and women using the excuse of _just following orders_ to hunt down, capture, and torture a man in the name of national security.

 

Or, on the other side in the “probably not but maybe” column, he even expects a sheepish, timid smile. A greeting from a tired friend, and a quiet request for security, for sanctuary, for food and water – a careful plea to be allowed to come home.

 

The scenarios keep the part of his mind that isn’t occupied with flying busy. They keep him from realizing the silence inside of the helmet and trying to fix it; they keep him from calling out for one person only to receive a different voice. They keep him from the emptiness of lost banter and scolding chides and frantically given advice – and in that, imagining Bruce either wrecked or broken, they keep Tony in the air and out of the ocean, from just letting himself sink.

 

None of them had included landing on a small, empty beach in the birth of night, Bruce Banner’s form hunched in an upright fetal position in the sand, looking for all the world as if he’s in the middle of a psychotic break. No soldier or government personnel in sight. No indication of fire or battle or even a small Hulk-out.

 

The lack of violence or apparent _need_ in front of him snaps away the emptiness in Tony’s chest to pure incredulity.

 

“… Please don’t tell me you called me here because of a panic attack,” he hears himself beg carelessly. “I’m not good at dealing with panic attacks. Ask JARV-.” He stops himself too late. _Damn it._

But Bruce is laughing, and it sounds a little hysterical, and a little _less bitter than it should be_ , and Tony flips up his faceplate.

 

“Seriously,” he continues, watching as Bruce’s head lifts. There are grains of sand sticking to his head, illuminated by the suit’s arc reactor, a shine to his face beneath his eyes – Christ, has he been _crying_? “Please. Tell me you didn’t. Bruce? Tell me Ross is hiding somewhere close by. Tell me this is a _trap._ Tell me you had an incident and broke a volcano, _anything._ ”

 

The other man regards him for a handful of seconds. “… You look like shit, Stark,” he finally says, his odd smile not really fading. “When’s the last time you slept? Or ate something?”

 

_(“I have found that humans normally do require at least five hours of sleep to properly function, sir.”)_

 

“Oh my God,” Tony bites out as Bruce slowly gets to his feet, sand falling from his body like snow. His insides snap again, and he stumbles under a wash of immediate coolness in his limbs. “Oh my God, _you asshole_ , I hate you so much right now, what the hell is your problem-.”

 

He doesn’t see the weird smile slip from Bruce’s face because with the next breath, he’s staring at lit-white sand, his head light, his ears filled with the whimpers of creaking armor as his suit begins to fold with his body toward the ground.

 

He thinks he hears a startled, concerned “Tony?!” but his head is beginning to spin, and it’s almost too much to think to put the faceplate back down before everything goes dark as his knees resonate pain with a _thud._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to pretend that Bruce and Natasha weren't interacting strangely in Age of Ultron, but I'm damn well going to make Bruce figure out _why_.


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

 

 

_(we could fly. just a little higher. **too high.** this jet is built for it. can even go straight up. **not good.** think of how pretty it’ll be, with all the stars. we’ll see them so clearly. **dangerous.** please. just fly up. just do this for me. **don’t be sad.** please. I just want it to b **e** **qui** et for a little while. only a little while)_

In the hours that hover between twilight and dawn, the sky is an awe-inspiring vision of navy blue and oblivion, the ocean of stars that swarm the vastness of space sparkling with their natural radiance uninhibited by the light pollution made by man. Without a cloud nearby to eat them up, it’s as if being under their blanket, wrapped in a strange knowledge that there is the potential of an existence of something watchful, beautiful, far better than anything on Earth that has ever touched and bruised you.

 

The view, the whimsical thought of being alone but not, has been what has kept Bruce breathing throughout these nights – what has kept his thoughts from overwhelming the silence of the stars in the recesses of his sleepless mind.

 

Now, his eyes leave them to dart yet another quick glance at Tony’s sleeping form, a half-second before an exhale of breath hitches audibly in the billionaire’s throat for the twenty-third time. Under the glow of the moon and the shadows cast by the parachute Bruce has hung like a roof to block Tony's sight of the stars should he wake before light, the man looks even worse than when he had landed on the beach hours before.

 

“I wish you would tell me _something_ ,” he says lowly to the suit standing guard feet away, swallowing down any anger his voice thinks it has the right to hold. As with every time Bruce has addressed her since their arrival, FRIDAY doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s spoken, let alone give an answer, as silent now as she had been when she’d retracted the armor from Tony’s body to allow Bruce to pull the unconscious man from the whirrs of the machinery and onto the makeshift bed for an anxious, fast evaluation. Warm skin, chapped lips, a quickened pulse, he’d lost so much _weight_ – “Like the last time he’s eaten, or the last time he’s slept for more than two hours. I’d even settle for a recording of his ranting on the way over here. _Something.”_

FRIDAY gleams in the moonlight and maintains her quiet, neglectful vigil. He ignores the pulse of coldness in his neck at the AI’s indifference of him, sighs instead. “You could at least take him back home, get him to the team. They’d take care of him. … He shouldn’t be here.” _I don’t want him here._

As if using Bruce’s unwarranted thoughts for cues, Tony’s breath hitches harshly again, the sound grating against his nerves violently enough that he flinches.

 

The noises of another person are loud. He’d forgotten, after all of his time in the Tower, after all of his time surrounding himself with the team, how loud people actually are. Tony’s breathing, the subtle twitches of his body against the nighttime sand, the beat of his pulse that Bruce can still feel tingling against the tops off his fingers. He’s at least ten feet away, just far enough to be safe, and he can still hear _everything._

 

_(You think you can hide from me? You think I can’t find you? I can hear you breathing, you little shit. So damn loud. Unnatural. I know exactly where you are-)_

Bruce’s eyes move back to the stars pleadingly. “Stop,” he whispers, trying to keep it soft.

 

_‘People can be distracting,’_ Natasha had said to him once, while they’d both been sprawled across the mats in the gym, cooling down. Ironically, at the time, she’d been looking at Tony. Bruce remembers chuckling at her pointedly arched eyebrow. _‘It’s annoying as hell, but it’s not always a bad thing.’_ He remembers her smile and the quiet glitter of her eyes on him.

 

No one is talking. FRIDAY may as well be asleep if not for the alert glow of the arc reactor in the armor’s chest, and each breath Bruce takes feels like he’s inhaling mouthfuls of tar, numbly suffocating with each one. It’s so loud, that even though the stars never speak, they seem muted in their silence. So loud.

 

_(Do you know what’s wrong with you? Do you? I’ll fucking tell you)_

A whine, sudden and sharp and pained, cracks across the beach.

 

It’s so vicious that Bruce’s whole body jumps at the tail end of it, his heart giving its first threatening hammer in not long enough.

 

His eyes fall rapidly back to Tony just in time for another whine, lighter and higher than the first, to lash out, Tony’s arm reaching out with it, fingers grasping desperately at the useless sand – his breathing becomes as fast and audible as the frantic gunfire of a confused soldier’s machine gun, whistling with cries that can’t wait for another deep inhale to come out.

 

_'Do you ever think about-‘_

Bruce scrambles madly to his feet, pieces of himself scattering around him as he moves quickly to the man’s side. But Tony’s already rolling, falling off of the bed of Bruce’s spare clothing, his face falling into the sand.

 

It’s always been New York – it’s always been space – it’s always been images or talk of the Chitauri on the news that has set him off in the past.

 

Bruce hadn’t thought about the _sand._

He’s closer, ducking under the parachute-tent, and it’s louder, his head throbs, but his hands are moving automatically, grasping gently for Tony’s bony shoulders in a manner that had become ingrained when living in the Tower. His hands tingle again at the contact, the warmth of another living body – Tony’s gasping, and it’s loud, and Bruce pulls him up and against his own body anyway.

 

_(Don’t make me-)_

* * *

 

_‘I would go out of business for peace.’_

_They’ve got guns, and in the cave, the leader kneels in front of the chair they have him tied to. Breathing hurts, the wiring inside of his chest brushing against the metal with sharp shocks that make his fingers twitch and his teeth ache._

_“Do you believe, Anthony Stark, that the worst fate that can befall a man is death?”_

_The light that hangs from the lines in the ceiling is bright and glaring and painful._

_He’s never been capable of keeping his mouth shut. “Well, death is, you know, the end. If you die, you can’t do anything else. So …” His shoulders burn from the restraints as he shrugs them, going for nonchalance. It’s what Dad had always said – don’t fucking let them know you’re scared. “Yeah. Death? Not awesome.”_

_He doesn’t know how many of them understand what he’s said, but the leader who speaks English smiles with too many teeth._

_“Allow me to show you what else is ‘not awesome’.”_

_He’s untied, grabbed – someone lifts the battery off of his lap and pulls it just far enough to sting. His feet are dragged through the Godforsaken sand, but their guns clack against their belts, aren’t drawn out to be aimed at his head again. So he’s fine. He’s going to be fine – they won’t kill him, they need him. And as long as they need him, he’ll be fine._

_They tow him toward a trough of dirty water._

_(He doesn’t mean to, but he takes a breath. Just one, just one time – he needs it, he needs it, he can’t fucking breathe-)_

_‘What a way to go.’_

_His head jerks up – the jolting from the wires of the battery is gone from his chest, and instead it’s the heavy weight of the arc reactor casing, snug and deep between his lungs, that’s stealing his breath as he stares into a sea of stars._

_Space is liquid. Space is cold. There’s no oxygen in space for him to steal to breathe even if he wants to._

_It’s an army that swims before him – a goddamn fleet of alien destruction moving toward the planet he’s left exposed. His bomb has done nothing, bombs are insignificant. They take out too much and leave even more, he can’t stop it. He thinks he’s tried and only made it worse. A whale full of soldiers comes directly at him, large and taunting and ready, undestroyed._

_He falls back, vision not going black fast enough to take away the image._

_(Do you know the worst part about the desert, Tony Stark? It’s not the dehydrating heat, or the rays of the sun that burn and peel away your exposed skin. It is the nights, when everything goes quiet, when the sun abandons the sands to wake up the other side of the Earth and takes the heat away with it. To survive a day in the desert exposed beneath the sun is one thing. To survive a night under the chill of that loneliness is something else entirely)_

_‘I’m sorry.’_

_He lands heavily on his back in a flurry of white snow, the armor breaking apart beneath him. The stars loom over his head, their usual safe distance away, twinkling in their innocent lie of “being alone” – and he is._

_“I’m sorry, sir,” the old familiar voice crackles in his ear._

_He takes a breath, but the oxygen doesn’t reach his lungs. The weight in his chest doesn’t have the familiar press of the reactor._

_“J?”_

_Silence returns his greeting._

_He goes to push himself up – the armor fades away like the useless contraption it is, but the snow isn’t cold beneath his hands. It’s warm, almost … hot. Almost like sand._

_“JARVIS?” He tries again. His voice comes out breathy, his throat seizing up. He touches the set against his ear, searching. But there isn’t an answer._

_The sky doesn’t split open. The snow doesn’t magically transform into the sand that it feels like; this isn’t a dream. The armor is gone, but that’s alright, he doesn’t need it anymore. He’s done, he’s left, and he’s … God, he’s alone. Like he wants to be._

_He closes his eyes to the stars._

_(This could have been avoided if you hadn’t played with something you don’t understand)_

_‘We’re monsters.’_

“… okay, Tony …”

_Warmth blossoms across the side of his neck, under the speaker where JARVIS’ voice doesn’t break out._

_The snow-sand is hot, but he’s suddenly very cold._

“…ne this before, I’m here. Tony, I’m right here. You’re al…”

_(Sounds like a cold world)_

_‘I’ve seen colder.’_

_Gunmetal gray and eyes that had glowed red. He chokes. There’s nothing to choke on._

_Another burst of warmth falls on the opposite side. He opens his eyes back to the darkness of the sky and stars that aren’t innocent._

“…a dream, Tony, I swear. I’m right here, wake up.”

_He doesn’t deserve it, he doesn’t need it. But he curls toward it, burying his face in the snow-sand, the speaker shifting, silent, against his face as he does._

“Wake up, Tony.”

* * *

 

 

The first time Bruce had dared to pull Tony from a nightmare had been just weeks after he’d had the arc reactor removed – Tony had almost bruised Bruce’s eye, and Bruce had almost broken Tony’s body. And the Tower.

 

Now, on this nameless beach under the covering of the stretched parachute, Bruce’s hands are careful against Tony’s too-thin body as they still remember how to be, and Tony is sobbing quietly into his neck. Quietly, but Bruce can hear every inch of the breath the cries take. They race against his ears like sandpaper, loud and unforgiving, a forgotten sound.

 

_(You think that you can do anything good? That your hands can bring anything but pain to other people? Look what you’ve already done!)_

 

He’s careful to shift the exhausted man back onto the clothes and off of the sand. It’s not enough, Tony will still recognize what’s under him, but it’s all Bruce can do. Tony’s somewhere between awake and asleep, too far up for his nightmare to hold him, but not enough to push away or stop the shaking in his limbs. He’d be mortified at his tears.

 

“It’s okay,” Bruce says quietly, keeping up his gentle touches to ground his friend. He casts a glance at the unmoving armor, his own exhaustion wrapping along the back of his neck. “He’s okay, FRIDAY.”

 

The AI remains unresponsive, and Bruce swallows, knowing.

 

This is his fault.

 


End file.
